The Iron Horse Rides West - Railroads in Western Fiction

Kidnapping a train-load of children worth a king's ransom, a group of bandits hide deep in the Devil's Catacombs. But Skye Fargo could track the Devil himself, and he's determined to send these outlaws to Hell.

Former Union Army captain Dane Bowman, an undercover troubleshooter for the railroad, stars in this first title of Lancer's Golden Spike trilogy. Returning to Kansas, Bowman goes up against a bandit chief and his men who are sabotaging the railroad with robberies and shootings.

One man ruled the mountainside - and made a deal with the would-be railroad's competitors. If Simon Striker could stop the steel tracks, he could earn a fortune. Now a brawling, quarrelling crew of immigrant railroad workers - Chinese, Irish and Polish - are about to be swept into a death trap in the mountain. And as Striker unleashes his landslide of terror, treachery and murder, a tough Irishman and sword-wielding Chinese fighter are going after him - in a battle of courage and cunning on a mountain stained with blood.

Lady gambler Mari Marshay decides to give it all up after a gunfight at her poker table kills a man. Leaving a note for the sheriff to locate the man's widow and return the deed to his ranch which was among her winnings, she boards the train called The Prairie Queen. Sheriff Milam has an urgent reason to catch up with Mari: the man has left a four-year-old orphan.

It's the last chance for Jacob Gamble, Rough Rider, outlaw and man of a few principles. Nearing 50 and flat broke, Jacob bends his own rule about robbing trains. But by the time he reaches the payroll safe on a Rock Island train, he finds another thief there first with a bullet in his head. Jacob is caught holding the bag - and turned into hero. A broke hero. Shackled by unwanted fame, running from a life gone wrong, and raising the suspicions of a Pinkerton detective, Jacob listens to a woman: beautiful and tattooed by the Indians who seized her as a child. Olivia Weathers knows of a treasure hidden in a cave along the Jornada del Muerto - a merciless hundred mile stretch of hell on earth guarded by Apache warriors. Now, Jacob will follow Olivia into the most savage and deadly territory in the southwest - where few ever come out of Canyon Diablo alive

Duncan Curry was a brilliant thief. Banks, trains –– anything with money was a job for him, and he did it well. During his years fighting for the Confederacy, he honed his skills in the name of a greater good. But now the Union is whole again, and Duncan Curry needs a job. When a man from his past approaches him asking if he will use his unique skills to guard the railroads, Curry cannot refuse.

Inez Stannert struggles to deal with her shaky partnership in Leadville's Silver Queen saloon, a missing husband, and a child still back East. President Ulysses S. Grant prepares to make an appearance to celebrate the coming of the railroad, but old enemies, general lawlessness, and ruthless competitors could ruin everything.

A train full of gold bars, and Jim Steel is hired to ride shotgun. California is full of gold hungry, and many of them don't care how they come by the riches. Loading saddlebags full of bars is way easier than grubbing in cold streams. But Jim Steel stands in their way.-Amazon

Someone is trying to sabotage a new railroad. They've already jumped Marshal Custis Long for investigating it. Longarm isn't certain what's behind this scheme, but he's sure going to blow it full of holes.

Hired to guard the Pacific Express during a trip to San Francisco, crime-solving cowboy sleuths Gustav "Old Red" Amlingmeyer and his brother, "Big Red," deal with a scheming gang of outlaws and a killer hiding among the train's passengers

Deputy Luke Cable's job has gotten whole lot harder lately. He's been acting marshal since Marshal Ben Keely left on a trip east--and disappeared. It's up to Luke to keep the peace, and that's hard to do since the arrival of the Outlaw Train, a traveling collection of curiosities, including the remains of notorious outlaws. But not all the outlaws in town are dead.

Lily Viner's father was a hard man, a claim-jumper and petty highwayman working out of Virginia City, but he was all the family she had. So when a stagecoach robbery goes bad, and he is killed in the shootout, she is left completely alone. But it is Lily's good fortune that the robbery was planned by the strange Irish outlaw known as King Callahan, who refuses to leave her to the mercy of the citizens of Virginia City. King Callahan is a criminal, but he's a man with a mission as well. He intends to do everything in his power to stop the railroad.

Central Oregon--the last frontier. Transportation is still by stagecoach and freight wagon. There is a movement afoot for a people's railroad, paid for by the state, to bring the benefits of rails to the area, to make it easier to ship livestock and produce, and to encourage settlement. For years the competing railroad barons, James J. Hill and Edward H. Harriman, have done nothing toward building a line in central Oregon, but now, under the impetus of the people's railroad bill, they both set out to do just that.

These days, if it wasn't for bad luck, John Slocum would have no luck at all. He's got no horse and is only one step ahead of vicious bounty hunters-- meaning that his only way out of San Diego is to stow away on the trouble-plagued Yuma Bullet express. And when he's unexpectedly hired to guard a railroad magnate's beautiful daughter, he finds himself facing down her outlaw fiancé-- and marauding Apache war parties. Surviving this disastrous train trip means Slocum must shoot fast and think faster. But keeping innocents safe and playing his enemies against each other means riding all the way to the bloody end of the line

Using an old cannon that once belonged to Napoleon's army, an outlaw gang has been bringing trains to a screeching halt and then robbing them. Now Edward Sheffield, one of the owners of the railroad, wants to hire Kid Morgan, the man known as The Loner, to wipe the gang off the map. Morgan isn't interested--even when Sheffield's hot-blooded wife tries to seduce him into going after the gang's leader, Gideon Black, a renegade ex-colonel-turned-outlaw. But when the gang turns their big gun on a town, killing several innocent people, Morgan is left with no choice. And the best way to take them out is to become one of them. But in the process, Morgan will uncover some unsavory secrets and find himself caught in the middle of two ruthless forces

Soldier, Sniper, Secret Service Agent, Regulator. Murphy answers only to the President. His latest assignment comes from President Garfield and is classified Top Secret. A serial killer is murdering railroad workers and settlers in the western states and territories. With nothing but his skill as a hunter and his knowledge of the budding science of forensics, Murphy begins a quest that takes him through a thousand miles of the west as he searches for the man responsible for dozens of murders.

As the nation recovers from the Civil War, Sky and Rebekah Winslow's wayward son Mark is slowly making his way north through Texas after his release from a Mexican prison. Headed for Omaha to work for the Union Pacific Railroad, he is forced to shoot a man, then thrown into jail to await his prison sentence. In a small Texas town where justice will not be served, Mark's only hope is the young woman whom he defended. Lola Montez had attempted to escape the horrible saloon life she inherited from her mother, but she was held there by circumstances beyond her control. When Mark Winslow stopped her attacker, he also became her ticket out of town. If Lola can break him out of jail, surely he will take her with him to look for her father in Omaha. But a jailbreak is a small matter compared to what they will face. Mark becomes a trouble-shooter for the Union Pacific, responsible for law and order in the towns that spring up as the transcontinental railroad heads west, and he must live by his gun. Lola must live by her iron heart and find her way in a West where only the strong survive. While treachery, betrayal, and sabotage lie before them, so does an unexpected confrontation with a kingdom not of this world.

Investigating a series of attacks on the Southern Pacific Railroad's Cascades express lines, Detective Bell learns of the existence of an elusive saboteur who recruits and murders his own accomplices while engineering schemes of maximum havoc.

Here's something fans of prolific western author Grey, who died nearly 70 years ago, probably weren't expecting: a new novel. In 1916, Grey decided to write an epic-scale historical novel about the building of the Union Pacific Railroad. It proved a difficult task, and his editor rewrote large chunks of it, eventually publishing the substantially altered book under a different title. Now Grey's original version is published, in all its sprawling glory.